Introduction

What is Ellcrys?

Ellcrys is a blockchain-based tool for creating open, transparent and multi-owned software products and organisations. Ellcrys allows people (e.g. developer, designers, end-users, investors) build a community dedicated to the creation and management of software products in an open and transparent approach. By providing a decentralised git hosting service, decentralised governance, cryptocurrency and self-executing functions (a.k.a Smart Contract), Ellcrys will pioneer a new shift where anyone can truly own a part of a software or business entity while having the ability to contribute skills, participate in governance and revenue sharing.

Why?

Ellcrys exists to provide a system that allows people to build software products and organizations openly, remotely without the frictions created by mistrust between collaborators. We have found out that this mistrust is caused by disagreements in how resources are utilized and managed. Because the world mostly operates on centralized basis where most businesses assume clients operate a central governance structure, they require one person to maintain an account and provide services to this individual. This setup cannot work for communities where equal ownership is expected. They cannot entrust shared resources to an individual to act on their behalf. There is also no way to prevent this individual to adhere to community wishes which means any punishment for bad action will be carried out after the fact when damage is down and expensive to fix.

Centralized Ownership

Today, most developers build open source software on Github. They send in their contributions to be reviewed, merged and released. For most projects, the Github account owner is responsible for the quality and direction of their project; Developers and users may not have much say in this matter.

This kind of structure cannot work for decentralised collaboration as there is a central point of failure which is a single account structure supported by Github. The account owner maintains the power to censor contributions, discussions and access. Imagine a decentralised team building an Uber alternative and being forced to trust an individual.

Additionally, Github being a private entity also means that decentralised teams have to cope with the risks associated with hosting their projects with centralised bodies on two levels. They have to worry about bad behaviour by the account owner and Github; This is not to say centralisation is evil and that Github will misbehave (unlikely) but we believe open and decentralised software organisations should have their roots from decentralized software repositories that cannot be censored.

This central ownership challenge is experience on other services like AWS, G-Suite etc.

Openness & Transparency

Operators of services we rely upon do not care to be transparent in the way they use our data and how certain features are implemented. We use these products without knowing how they operate and their effect on our privacy and other aspects of our lives. Service owners can freely alter the terms and behaviour of a product without informing users. Majority of these services are closed source and as such users are unable to read the source code and have no power to reject contentious, damaging features or business practices that endanger lives.

Open Source Organisations

We are at a time when users are increasingly beginning to demand more transparency and control of their data. Unfortunately, service providers see users as the product. The lifeblood of their businesses and as such will offer control just to the point that their business model can support. There is a need of open source communities to rise to invent new services and provide alternative services that are open, transparent and most importantly user-first. Blockchain technology will be the base for this type of community-driven products as it supports a natural funding mechanism and can create an ecosystem comprising of people working to support services built on it.